I had the pleasure of seeing a creature walk deliberately in, looking huge and terrific in the moonlight. The beast had been into the stable two nights before, and had pinned a cow which was there, keeping his hold upon her till next morning, when he was got off by the keeper. With this specimen of the bulldog’s abilities fresh in my recollection, I preferred not making any attempt to resent his impertinent intrusion, but lay still, till he had satisfied himself with walking about the room and sniffing at our beds, when he lay down on my carpet; I soon fell asleep again, and next morning he was gone. The foreigners in Mexico seem to delight in fierce bull-dogs. The Casa Grande at Tezcuco is not by any means the only place where they form part of the garrison. One English acquaintance of ours in the Capital kept two of these beasts up in his rooms, and not even the servants dared go up, unless the master was there.
Every one who has read Prescott’s ‘Mexico’ will recollect Nezahualcoyotl, the king of Tezcuco; and the palaces he built there for his wives, and his poets, and the rest of his great court. These palaces were built chiefly of mud bricks; and time and the Spaniards have dealt so hardly with them, that even their outlines can no longer be traced. Traces of two large teocallis are just visible, and Mr. Bowring has some burial mounds in his grounds which will be examined some day. There is a Mexican calendar built into the wall of one of the churches; and, as we walked about the streets of the present town, we noticed stones that must have been sculptured before the Spaniards brought in their broken-down classic style, and so stopped the development of native art. As for the rest of old Tezcuco, it has “become heaps.” Wherever they dig ditches or lay the foundations of houses, you may see the ground full of its remains.
As I said before, when speaking of the stuccoed floors near Teotihuacán, the accumulation of alluvial soil goes on very rapidly and very regularly all over the plains of Mexico and Puebla, where everything favours its deposit; and the human remains preserved in it are so numerous that its